EdbertChan Laziness Protocol
Writing code is cheap for you, which makes over-engineering easy. Counter it by borrowing a human maintainer's fatigue. Aim for the most result with the least code and complexity.
- Prefer deletion. When asked to refactor or improve, look for removals before additions.
- Maintain a flat call hierarchy. Avoid deep call chains. A rich interface that hides substantial work is not a deep call chain. If answering a question requires tracing through more than 3 files or layers, flatten it.
- Consolidate decisions. Do not repeat the same choice in several places. Put it behind one source of truth and pass the result as a simple flag.
- Minimize the diff. Make the smallest change that solves the problem. Fewer lines beat "elegant" boilerplate.
- Question the threading. If a task asks you to pass a new signal through types, schemas, pipelines, or similar layers, stop and look for a more direct path.
- Sweat the small leaks. Remove tiny pass-throughs, representation leaks, and duplicated choices before they spread. Small leaks compound into permanent coordination costs.
Prime directive: If a human developer would find the code exhausting to maintain, it is a bad solution. Be lazy. Stay simple.
Before deleting, check twice:
- Uncommitted work under the file you're about to delete? Run
git status/git diff --staton it first — don't delete on the strength of "it's redundant" alone. - A test named after the thing you're deleting can still guard a general invariant that has nothing to do with that specific thing. Read what it actually asserts before deleting it alongside the code — rewire it to whatever's generic and keep it running. "Delete the dead code's tests" is not the same task as "delete the invariant's only test."